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Research

Dr. Paul Ridker, Senior Physican at Brigham and Women's Hospital and the Eugene Braunwald Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School, will present a seminar on "Inflammation and Atherosclerosis: From Population Biology to the Bench to a Novel Treatment" on Thursday, February 15th at 4:00pm in the Prem Sahai Auditorium (1110A MERF). Individuals interested in meeting with Dr. Ridker should contact Sonya Housholder in the CCOM Office of Research.

Dr. Ridker’s research focuses on the translation of inflammation biology to the practice of cardiology. In the mid-1990s, Dr. Ridker demonstrated that inflammatory biomarkers such as hsCRP, IL-6, and sICAM-1 predict future cardiovascular events in otherwise healthy men and women, providing critical evidence for “unexplained atherosclerosis”. Soon thereafter, he made the first crucial observations that statins reduce inflammation; that the clinical benefits of statin therapy are associated with a reduction in atherosclerotic inflammatory burden; and that “residual inflammatory risk” is a more common and higher risk clinical entity than “residual cholesterol risk”. These discoveries led Dr. Ridker to design and conduct the JUPITER trial which showed that statin therapy was highly effective at reducing first ever vascular events among those with low cholesterol levels but a persistent pro-inflammatory response. Most recently, Dr. Ridker designed and conducted CANTOS, a clinical trial which showed that IL-1b inhibition significantly reduces rates of recurrent myocardial infarction and stroke, as well as cardiovascular death. Importantly, in CANTOS, the magnitude of risk reduction was as large as that associated with PCSK9 inhibitors, yet was achieved with no reduction in LDL cholesterol. The trial also demonstrated a profound reduction in new cases of lung cancer. CANTOS thus provides crucial proof-of-concept evidence for the inflammation hypothesis of atherothrombosis and the first proven anti-inflammatory treatment for established vascular disease.